The Man of the Forest by Zane Grey (fb2 epub reader .txt) 📕

>So he tried to throw off gloom and apprehension, but he

failed. His comrades did not rally to his help. Wilson

walked away, nodding his head.

 

“Boss, let Jim alone,” whispered Shady. “It’s orful the way

you buck ag’in’ him — when you seen he’s stirred up. Jim’s

true blue. But you gotta be careful.”

 

Moze corroborated this statement by gloomy nods.

 

When the card-playing was resumed, Anson did not join the

game, and both Moze and Shady evinced little of that

whole-hearted obsession which usually attended their

gambling. Anson lay at length, his head in a saddle,

scowling at the little shelter where the captive girl kept

herself out of sight. At times a faint song or laugh, very

unnatural, was wafted across the space. Wilson plodded at

the cooking and apparently heard no sounds. Presently he

called the men to eat, which office they surlily and

silently performed, as if it was a favor bestowed upon the

cook.

 

“Snake, hadn’t I ought to take a bite of grub over to the

gurl?” asked Wilson.

 

“Do you hev to ask me thet?” snapped Anson. “She’s gotta be

fed, if we hev to stuff it down her throat.”

 

“Wal, I ain’t stuck on the job,” replied Wilson. “But I’ll

tackle it, seein’ you-all got cold feet.”

 

With plate and cup be reluctantly approached the little

lean-to, and, kneeling, he put his head inside. The girl,

quick-eyed and alert, had evidently seen him coming. At any

rate, she greeted him with a cautious smile.

 

“Jim, was I pretty good?” she whispered.

 

“Miss, you was shore the finest aktress I ever seen,” he

responded, in a low voice. “But you dam near overdid it. I’m

goin’ to tell Anson you’re sick now — poisoned or somethin’

awful. Then we’ll wait till night. Dale shore will help us

out.”

 

“Oh, I’m on fire to get away,” she exclaimed. “Jim Wilson,

I’ll never forget you as long as I live!”

 

He seemed greatly embarrassed.

 

“Wal — miss — I — I’ll do my best licks. But I ain’t

gamblin’ none on results. Be patient. Keep your nerve. Don’t

get scared. I reckon between me an’ Dale you’ll git away

from heah.”

 

Withdrawing his head, he got up and returned to the

campfire, where Anson was waiting curiously.

 

“I left the grub. But she didn’t touch it. Seems sort of

sick to me, like she was poisoned.”

 

“Jim, didn’t I hear you talkin’?” asked Anson.

 

“Shore. I was coaxin’ her. Reckon she ain’t so ranty as she

was. But she shore is doubled-up, an’ sickish.”

 

“Wuss an’ wuss all the time,” said Anson, between his teeth.

“An’ where’s Burt? Hyar it’s noon an’ he left early. He

never was no woodsman. He’s got lost.”

 

“Either thet or he’s run into somethin’,” replied Wilson,

thoughtfully.

 

Anson doubled a huge fist and cursed deep under his breath

— the reaction of a man whose accomplices and partners and

tools, whose luck, whose faith in himself had failed him. He

flung himself down under a tree, and after a while, when his

rigidity relaxed, he probably fell asleep. Moze and Shady

kept at their game. Wilson paced to and fro, sat down, and

then got up to bunch the horses again, walked around the

dell and back to camp. The afternoon hours were long. And

they were waiting hours. The act of waiting appeared on the

surface of all these outlaws did.

 

At sunset the golden gloom of the glen changed to a vague,

thick twilight. Anson rolled over, yawned, and sat up. As he

glanced around, evidently seeking Burt, his face clouded.

 

“No sign of Burt?” he asked.

 

Wilson expressed a mild surprise. “Wal, Snake, you ain’t

expectin’ Burt now?”

 

“I am, course I am. Why not?” demanded Anson. “Any other

time we’d look fer him, wouldn’t we?”

 

“Any other time ain’t now… . Burt won’t ever come back!”

Wilson spoke it with a positive finality.

 

“A-huh! Some more of them queer feelin’s of yourn —

operatin’ again, hey? Them onnatural kind thet you can’t

explain, hey?”

 

Anson’s queries were bitter and rancorous.

 

“Yes. An’, Snake, I tax you with this heah. Ain’t any of

them queer feelin’s operatin’ in you?”

 

“No!” rolled out the leader, savagely. But his passionate

denial was a proof that he lied. From the moment of this

outburst, which was a fierce clinging to the old, brave

instincts of his character, unless a sudden change marked

the nature of his fortunes, he would rapidly deteriorate to

the breaking-point. And in such brutal, unrestrained natures

as his this breaking-point meant a desperate stand, a

desperate forcing of events, a desperate accumulation of

passions that stalked out to deal and to meet disaster and

blood and death.

 

Wilson put a little wood on the fire and he munched a

biscuit. No one asked him to cook. No one made any effort to

do so. One by one each man went to the pack to get some

bread and meat.

 

Then they waited as men who knew not what they waited for,

yet hated and dreaded it.

 

Twilight in that glen was naturally a strange, veiled

condition of the atmosphere. It was a merging of shade and

light, which two seemed to make gray, creeping shadows.

 

Suddenly a snorting and stamping of the horses startled the

men.

 

“Somethin’ scared the hosses,” said Anson, rising. “Come

on.”

 

Moze accompanied him, and they disappeared in the gloom.

More trampling of hoofs was heard, then a cracking of brush,

and the deep voices of men. At length the two outlaws

returned, leading three of the horses, which they haltered

in the open glen.

 

The campfire light showed Anson’s face dark and serious.

 

“Jim, them hosses are wilder ‘n deer,” he said. “I ketched

mine, an’ Moze got two. But the rest worked away whenever we

come close. Some varmint has scared them bad. We all gotta

rustle out thar quick.”

 

Wilson rose, shaking his head doubtfully. And at that moment

the quiet air split to a piercing, horrid neigh of a

terrified horse. Prolonged to a screech, it broke and ended.

Then followed snorts of fright, pound and crack and thud of

hoofs, and crash of brush; then a gathering thumping,

crashing roar, split by piercing sounds.

 

“Stampede!” yelled Anson, and he ran to hold his own horse,

which he had haltered right in camp. It was big and

wild-looking, and now reared and plunged to break away.

Anson just got there in time, and then it took all his

weight to pull the horse down. Not until the crashing,

snorting, pounding melee had subsided and died away over the

rim of the glen did Anson dare leave his frightened

favorite.

 

“Gone! Our horses are gone! Did you hear ‘em?” he exclaimed,

blankly.

 

“Shore. They’re a cut-up an’ crippled bunch by now,” replied

Wilson.

 

“Boss, we’ll never git ‘ern back, not ‘n a hundred years,”

declared Moze.

 

“Thet settles us, Snake Anson,” stridently added Shady

Jones. “Them hosses are gone! You can kiss your hand to

them… . They wasn’t hobbled. They hed an orful scare.

They split on thet stampede an’ they’ll never git together.

… See what you’ve fetched us to!”

 

Under the force of this triple arraignment the outlaw leader

dropped to his seat, staggered and silenced. In fact,

silence fell upon all the men and likewise enfolded the

glen.

 

Night set in jet-black, dismal, lonely, without a star.

Faintly the wind moaned. Weirdly the brook babbled through

its strange chords to end in the sound that was hollow. It

was never the same — a rumble, as if faint, distant thunder

— a deep gurgle, as of water drawn into a vortex — a

rolling, as of a stone in swift current. The black cliff was

invisible, yet seemed to have many weird faces; the giant

pines loomed spectral; the shadows were thick, moving,

changing. Flickering lights from the campfire circled the

huge trunks and played fantastically over the brooding men.

This campfire did not burn or blaze cheerily; it had no

glow, no sputter, no white heart, no red, living embers. One

by one the outlaws, as if with common consent, tried their

hands at making the fire burn aright. What little wood had

been collected was old; it would burn up with false flare,

only to die quickly.

 

After a while not one of the outlaws spoke or stirred. Not

one smoked. Their gloomy eyes were fixed on the fire. Each

one was concerned with his own thoughts, his own lonely soul

unconsciously full of a doubt of the future. That brooding

hour severed him from comrade.

 

At night nothing seemed the same as it was by day. With

success and plenty, with full-blooded action past and more

in store, these outlaws were as different from their present

state as this black night was different from the bright day

they waited for. Wilson, though he played a deep game of

deceit for the sake of the helpless girl — and thus did not

have haunting and superstitious fears on her account — was

probably more conscious of impending catastrophe than any of

them.

 

The evil they had done spoke in the voice of nature, out of

the darkness, and was interpreted by each according to his

hopes and fears. Fear was their predominating sense. For

years they had lived with some species of fear — of honest

men or vengeance, of pursuit, of starvation, of lack of

drink or gold, of blood and death, of stronger men, of luck,

of chance, of fate, of mysterious nameless force. Wilson was

the type of fearless spirit, but he endured the most gnawing

and implacable fear of all — that of himself — that he

must inevitably fall to deeds beneath his manhood.

 

So they hunched around the campfire, brooding because hope

was at lowest ebb; listening because the weird, black

silence, with its moan of wind and hollow laugh of brook,

compelled them to hear; waiting for sleep, for the hours to

pass, for whatever was to come.

 

And it was Anson who caught the first intimation of an

impending doom.